Though I’ve personally encountered rather surly Amtrak Police at NYP; in their defense, the person they were attempting to subdue required an escalation of force and so they deployed a taser on him. It was because the firing of that taser sounded like a gunshot that people panicked and dropped everything, including meals they were eating and in one case, a cell phone. This had a ripple effect all the way to Herald Square and Macy’s, where people also reported gunfire (false occurrence).
I’m not sure what their response should have been, otherwise. Hand the dude a Pepsi and hope he smiles in appreciation and calms right down? I guess they could use a different type of taser that was silent, but would also probably require device-to-skin contact, which can be problematic in developing situations. In days gone by, they would have used batons and just started whaling on him. The ultimate solution, of course, is to deploy an actual firearm inside a populated building. That would definitely sound like a gunshot and could have unintended consequences as well (‘collateral damage’). Given all the crazy people doing crazy things in places like New York, I would tend to trust their judgment in a location like Penn Station. Also, the video I saw had the perpetrator in handcuffs walking with officers, so he wasn’t harmed. The only issue seems to be the acoustics in the building that make a non-lethal device sound like a very lethal one to a number of people.